League of Legends Deconstruction

League of legends is a MOBA (Multiplayer online battle Arena) game which is a type of of RTS (Real-time Strategy) genre game. Players can choose a champion and form a team for a 5v5 battle on the Summoner’s Rift map. Unlike DOTA and Starcraft in League of Legends player can only control one unit which is their champion. The ultimate goal and winning condition of the game is to destroy enemy team’s base nexus structure which results in victory. In order to destroy the nexus players first have to destroy the towers that allow them to progress on their path towards the nexus.

Game Core Loop

Every time player wins or loses a match Influence Points (IP) are awarded to the player. The winning player gets more IP points compared to the losing player. Players can use the Influence points to purchase new character or Runes. Runes increase the stats of your character and can only be purchased using grind currency which is IP points. This encourages players to keep playing in order collect a sum of IP that is enough to purchase their wanted new character or a set of new runes. It's worth noticing that user can only buy Runes using IP points so they cannot be purchased using money which eliminates the Pay to Win factor from the game and introduces the Play more to win factor.

Runes

Provides bonus stats to your character such as bonus armor, health, damage and Mana etc. Can be purchased used IP points.

Mastery Points

Mastery points are unlocked by levelling up and can be used to unlock different Masteries in Mastery Pages. These Masteries give passive bonuses to your character which can be health, movement speed, armor, mana regeneration etc. These mastery pages can be customized according to the Champion player is using.

Monetization Loop

Monetization loop comes in from Riot Points which is the premium currency in the game. When the player reaches level 3, they are awarded 400 Riot Points to spend for free, but this is a pretty small number and pretty soon the player needs to spend real money to get more RP in order to purchase skins or consumable buffs. The monetization in League of Legends doesn’t feel forced, players can play for years without spending any money, but the paying users can boost up their levelling up and progression speed by purchasing consumable boosts which increases the XP and IP gain for a limited amount of time.

So the non-paying user needs to play more in order to gain same amount of XP or IP as the paying user.

While Skins and summoner icons are purely cosmetic upgrades, players can also buy more Rune and Mastery pages using Riot Points which provides an advantage when player is competing against highly skilled enemies.

Consumable Boosts

Players can purchase IP and XP boosts to level up faster or to gain more IP points faster in order to purchase runes and champions. Some of the examples of different types of boosts can be seen in the image attached below. While this type of monetization is not forced but it still gives an advantage to the paying user because he is able to level up/ Get IP points faster compared to a non paying user.

Pay to Compete Model

While League of Legends doesn’t follow the Pay to Win model, it does follow the Pay to Compete model. Paying users can get more Rune Pages quickly by purchasing them through RP which gives them an advantage against non paying users who only have the default 2 Rune pages. Example:

Rune Pages

Rune pages can be made before the match starts in order to buff up your character and give it bonus stats but the Rune pages are specific to particular characters, so if user want to have rune pages for more characters he needs to purchase them using IP or RP. The price of the rune pages in IP is set very high so user is tempted to purchase them using RP points so the paying users get a slight edge in this scenario. It is important to note that skill level also plays a huge part in these type of games, so the player with a slight advantage in having more rune pages doesn’t imply that he is more likely to win the game. The outcome of the game greatly depends on the skill level of the players.

The main thing that this type of model needs to achieve is to make a game that is fair and balanced between non-paying and paying players. Which is achieved by League of Legends perfectly.

Community Driven

Community plays a huge role is success of games like League of Legends. League of Legends has a very supportive and hardcore fan base.
Riot Games have over the years managed to find an incredible ability to reach out to their community and make the game something that transcends gaming and feels like a blend between a hobby / sport / lifestyle. This shows the power of understanding the people that love your product and tailoring and tweaking it so that those players / customers are super-engaged with your product.

Conclusion

Riot is a great company in terms for listening to what their fan base demands. League of Legends is an example of when companies take the reviews of their players on high priority, Players stick to their game and with 12M DAU, many of which will be super-engaged high spending / repeat customers, their business model makes perfect sense. And this is a game that is fun, fair, balanced and addictive. Players are happy to pay because they want to and not because they have to.